


Kin to St. Jude

by Deannie



Series: Cowboys and Zombies [3]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Gen, Old West Zombie AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 15:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6476326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I know a place,” Josiah said, turning from his sister’s grave and heading back to the cabin. “There’s a town beyond Eagle Bend. Little place, bad reputation. Four Corners, it’s called.”</p><p>Josiah and Nathan meet up and travel to a town that doesn't know what it's in for...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kin to St. Jude

**Author's Note:**

> It's been eons since I updated this series, but I'm working on it now. I know, I know, another AU—but I started this a LOOOONNNGG time before I started the Super AU, and that AU is Randi's fault anyway, not mine :).

Nathan Jackson had learned more than he wanted to know about the dangers of the world in his thirty-two years on Earth. Even given the evils he’d seen as a slave on the plantation, most of the truly important lessons he’d learned in the last three months, and one of the most important was to never travel at night.

Almost no one did in these parts anymore. If you were caught out, there was a good chance you’d be dead or worse by dawn, so you learned not to stray too far from home, if you had one. But after the massacre at Potash Spring, Nathan had set out on his own. Mack Wilson and the others had the town well in hand and Nathan felt a powerful need to hunt down some answers to what this contagion was and what to do about it.

Rick Kimble’s doctor friend in California said he’d seen a lot of different responses to the sickness, ranging from quick death to two or three weeks of unrelenting sickness. Those lingerers weren’t real common anymore, since most people who knew what the sickness made you into chose to take matters into their own hands. Nathan had seen too damn many suicides as the sickness took hold in his corner of the world. It made him sick, but he wasn’t sure he had it in him to condemn a one of them.

The doctor, Myron Cossican, did say he’d had one man actually survive the sickness and come out the other side, but he’d been killed a few days later by a mob of people who insisted he was a demon who’d survived through his own evil.

The world was insane now—moreso even than during the war. Instead of focusing on keeping safe and finding how to cure it, people seemed to just be using it as an excuse to kill each other. Nathan figured that was a damn shame, since the zombies were doing a good job of doing away with the population themselves. Sure as hell didn’t need any help.

Nathan traveled during the day, planning his journeys carefully to make sure he didn’t risk getting caught out. It didn’t always stop you running into the zombies, but they seemed to be more active at night. He wished sometimes that he could capture one. Study it. Apparently a friend of Dr. Cossican had tried that and been eaten for his troubles, so maybe it weren’t the best idea. Still, if they could learn more about the things…

He collected information in every town he entered and he kept moving. He wasn’t sure why—he didn’t really need to be on the move. But no place felt safe, and he’d just gotten used to it now. Stay a day or two, find out how bad the contagion was in that area, move on to the next town. He’d gone through Carson City a couple of weeks ago and found the place relatively untouched. Just a couple of ranch hands from the northern reaches of the area who’d been killed before they could attack anyone else. The nuns at the mission there wouldn’t speak to him, but the healer who ministered to them said he’d seen no sign of it within their walls, so that was something, anyway.

He’d spent a week in Logan and another in Merrypont, consulting with the local healers. Weren’t no doctors in either town, but the healers had some ideas about the way it spread. Horses could get it, but they all died. Could only be a good thing because Nathan wasn’t sure he could conceive of a horse zombie. Cows couldn’t, nor pigs nor chickens. Nathan figured people probably could get it from horses—might have been what happened to Hettie…

He thought on it all as he rode his way vaguely south-eastward, but kept an ear and an eye always open for anything that should have him drawing his gun. The weather was typical scorching for August, and he brought his canteen to his lips around mid morning to find the damn thing nearing empty. He looked around the expanse of scrub and cactus and saw a house on the plain to the east. If it was inhabited, he could beg some water from the well, warn them if they didn’t know of the danger. If it was deserted, maybe the well wasn’t fouled...

As he rode closer, he realized he was looking at the latter. The whole place seemed to be sagging, even from a distance. But he spied something as he neared the place that had him pulling out his rifle anyway. Two horses, freshly dead and fed on. He reached the house proper to see a half-dozen zombies in the yard, all with surprisingly accurate holes blasted in their skulls.

He only heard the sound of digging when he’d dismounted and started for the front door. Gripping his rifle tighter, he changed direction and headed around back.

A man in his mid-fifties stood in a half-dug grave, a body lying on the level ground beside it, carefully wrapped. The gravedigger was broad and must be a bear standing tall. Nathan himself was taller than most, but he wasn’t sure he’d want to face off against a man who looked that strong and powerful. His face was flat planes and strange angles, making him seem all the more dangerous. He looked up as Nathan cleared the side of the house and the rifle that had been beside the body was suddenly in his left hand, cocked and ready. Nathan raised both of his own hands in surrender, finger off the trigger and rifle pointed at the sky.

“It’s all right,” Nathan said quietly, watching the man’s slightly uncoordinated movements. Didn’t need to be too close to smell the drink on him. “I’m not here to make trouble.”

“Trouble’s been made, friend,” the man grumbled coldly, laying the rifle aside and going back to his digging as if nothing had happened. “Nothing to do about it but—” he grunted at the effort— “dispose of the mess.”

Nathan nodded, approaching more closely. “Seen you did a good job of that out front.”

The man gave a snort and glanced at the body in its shroud before returning to his work. The ground was hard-packed and dry and he didn’t seem to care. Must have been digging the thing since dawn.

“My name’s Nathan Jackson,” Nathan offered into the uncomfortable silence. “This your cabin?”

“Not mine,” the man said. “We were just using it for the night.” He dug hard, throwing dirt out of the grave with a burst of anger. “Carson City proved less than hospitable, but it appears moving on was even more disastrous. No place is safe these days.”

“Carson City?” Nathan asked, keeping the man talking. Now Nathan was closer, he could see blood coating the right arm of the man’s shirt, wetting the hilt of the shovel. “I was there a couple of weeks ago. Seemed like a good safe place to hole up.”

The man stopped digging and looked up at him fully for the first time. His eyes were red from more than drink and he laughed a cold, bitter laugh, the sense of power to him blunted by the pain and anguish in his face. “I think you’ll find it’s changed,” he said. “The world has changed. God’s forsaken us and the demons are taking over.”

Nathan couldn’t tell if it was the drink or actual religious fervor, so he skirted the subject. “Your friend?” he gestured to the body.

“Sister,” the man whispered, reaching out a gentle hand and laying it on the shroud. “Hannah.”

Nathan nodded cautiously. Damn. “Hannah. Was she bitten?”

“Bitten, killed, dispatched,” the man sighed despairingly. “I couldn’t leave her there,” he said sadly. “They would have…” His head shook along with his hands. “I couldn’t let them kill _her_.”

Nathan watched the shrouded body carefully. Lord, he couldn’t imagine. If one of his own sisters had been bitten, could he really do what needed to be done? Could this man? Most people went from dead to zombie in hours—sometimes moments, but Nathan had seen older bodies take as much as a day or two to turn. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Josiah,” the man answered dully. There really was a fair amount of blood on that arm and shovel. His shirt was ripped up near the shoulder and Nathan could see a bloodied wrapping underneath the stained muslin of it.

“Josiah, your sister,” he started slowly, palms sweating from more than the summer heat. “Do you know…? The sickness she has—”

“My sister has been saved, friend Nathan,” Josiah said quietly, reaching out with his sound arm to flip back the cover: a woman lay there with much more delicate features but the same thick wiry hair, maybe ten years his junior, face gray and sunken in death and a bullet hole neatly through her forehead. Josiah fell toward her, overcome by a second’s weakness, and bounced off the wall of the grave with a hiss.

“You’re hurt.” Nathan prayed the man wasn’t bitten, too. After that first horrible night in Potash Spring, he’d never fired on a living person. Though the thought had always been there—to offer a person death before they had to face worse—he suddenly knew that he couldn’t follow through. He couldn’t kill this man, even to save him.

Josiah grunted his agreement and straightened painfully as he gripped the shovel more firmly. “The fine citizens of Carson City disagreed with my choice to take her with me.”

Which didn’t answer a God damned thing. “What happened?” He reached out and stopped the older man as he moved to dig again. Like a compulsion. Or like all he had left in the world. “Josiah, I’ll help you bury her good and proper, I swear, but let me help you, first.”

Again the man looked up at him, and he must have seen the compassion in his eyes, because the shovel dropped to the bottom of the grave and Josiah sagged back against the wall to stop himself following it. “My shoulder,” he sighed. “Thought I’d wrapped it pretty good.”

Nathan clucked his disapproval, and tried to coax Josiah out of the hole. Once he’d gotten the dazed man sitting on the ground, he ran to Washington and led the steed around to the back of the house, ground tying him and retrieving Dr. Kimble’s bag.

“You’re a doctor?” Josiah asked. He would have sounded curious, but for the dull ache of loss and pain and shock in his voice.

“I ain’t no doctor,” Nathan said for perhaps the fiftieth time since leaving Potash Spring. “Just trying to help people.” He worked Josiah’s shirt off of him and unwound the very blood-soaked bandage, hissing at the wounds the bullet had made both entering and exiting. “Lord, Josiah! You’re lucky you didn’t bleed to death with this.”

“Am I?” The despair in the drunken words was heartbreaking.

“Yes,” Nathan told him firmly. “And the drink hasn’t helped matters, neither,” he scolded as he prepared his supplies. “This’ll have to be cleaned and stitched. It’s gonna hurt, now.”

Josiah smiled grimly. “So does the world, Brother Nathan.” He listed slightly as his energy finally gave out in the face of help and comfort. “Pain is the constant of living.”

“Don’t mean you gotta speed death along through your own rank stupidity,” Nathan grumbled.

Josiah simply shrugged in response and fell to the side in a dead faint.

*******

It was like wandering out of fog into flame.

Josiah’s head burned and his hands froze. A blur of hellfire rose around him and he thought it only fitting. He wasn’t good for much anymore, save to stoke the fires of Hell. He’d helped sweet Hannah to her Heavenly reward, but he would never see her there.

“Drink this now,” someone whispered. He looked up to see an impossibly tall, dark figure leaning over him and holding a cup that smelled too foul to contemplate. He drank anyway. He deserved what he got, right?

A darkness all-encompassing came too soon, followed some time later by more foulness from the spectre. After an eternity, the fire eased in his bones, replaced by an aching cold that tasted of failure.

His wits took too long to come back to him, but eventually, he opened swollen eyes to see a very tall, very young-seeming black man writing at a table by the feeble light of a traveling lamp. The table in the cabin. Josiah looked out the little window into full night and the memories came crashing in.

“Hannah!”

He jerked to a sitting position and the world dipped and yawed around him before the young man rushed over and held him steady.

“Easy now, Josiah,” he called, his voice rich with the kind of compassion Father had always preached but rarely displayed. “Just take a minute. You been out of your head all day.”

“My sister,” Josiah begged. “Where—”

The man pointed carefully to the corner by the back door, where the soft-shrouded body lay. “Once I got you dealt with, I finished her grave.” He looked at the dirt floor and reminded Josiah of an eight-year-old expecting a scolding. “Didn’t feel right to bury her for you, but you’re in no shape to dig anymore.”

Josiah put out his left hand and laid it on the young man’s shoulder. His own right arm was bound up tight and it hurt less than it had before Hannah died. “You’re a fine man, Nathan,” he murmured quietly, the name coming to him as his head cleared. “Thank you.”

Nathan’s smile was warm and engaging. “Wasn’t sure you’d remember any of that,” he admitted.

Josiah took a deep breath, the heat of the room making it feel like treacle. “Unfortunately, every moment of the last two days is seared into my memory, my friend.” He looked down to find himself shirtless, the blood cleaned from his skin and a fresh bandage on his shoulder to go with the new binding. “Are you a doctor?”

“Maybe not every moment,” Nathan said with a chuckle. “You asked me that before and I told you, I ain’t no doctor.” He looked over at Hannah’s body, his eyes sad. “Just trying to find out if there’s a way to stop this from happening to anyone else.”

“So you’re a saint, then,” Josiah said. “Kin to St. Jude, perhaps?” Nathan gave him a quizzical look and Josiah tried on a smile sizes too big for his soul as he explained. “The patron saint of hopeless causes.”

He tried to rise to his feet and fell back hard on the cot instead, feeling it creak and crack beneath him. Nathan was at his side again in a moment, frustration in his face.

“You stay put right there, old man,” he ordered, striding quickly back to the table to grab a tincup and return to the cot. “Drink this. You’re running a fever and I don’t want you dying on me.”

“Through my own rank stupidity?” Josiah asked with a wry smile, half remembering something he was sure Nathan had said to him. He drank the cup down, nearly choking as the horrid taste caught up to him. “Sounds like a doctor to me.”

Nathan looked chagrined and took back the vessel, turning away. “Sorry, I just…” He looked again at Hannah, and Josiah marveled at the lack of stink in all this heat. Though Nathan said he was running a fever so maybe the heat was in him, not the air. “The zombies are killing off enough of us as it is. Don’t need to see someone else die needlessly.”

“Zombies?” Josiah asked, rolling the name around his tongue. “I hadn’t heard that one yet.”

Nathan sat at the table again, taking up a pen and dipping it in an ink well so empty he was clearly digging for the substance. He set the pen to the book in front of him. “Old stories told by older slaves,” he said quietly. “Never did think they’d ever come true.”

They sat in silence for a while, Josiah glad not to hear the sounds of shuffling dead outside. An irritated snort could be heard in the direction of the cold room, though, and it wasn’t human. “You had a horse,” he ventured, barely remembering something bigger and blacker than the man before him.

“Washington,” Nathan supplied. “He’s tied up there in the lean-to.” He pointed toward the little side door that Josiah knew led to a closed-in room for supplies and wood for the stove. “Ain’t happy about it, but he’s been shut up in worse.” Nathan shook his head. “People can be damn stupid about their safety when they put their minds to it.”

“Can’t they just,” he agreed, thinking back to the nuns and their ridiculous secrecy.

Nathan seemed to be able to read his mind. “Carson City?” He leaned forward, setting the pen aside. “I rode through a while back and talked to the healer there. Thought things were well in hand.”

“They would’ve been,” Josiah agreed, contemplating rising again as his strength ebbed back to him. But God, it was hot! “The nuns decided they could contain the demons—offer the afflicted up to God.”

Nathan shook his head sadly. “They lied to the healer, then? Told him the convent was clean and…”

Josiah looked at his sister’s shroud, trying desperately not to remember the moment she, in her lunacy, panicked at the sight of one of the stricken nuns, lunging at the woman and crying of demons, while the demon itself pounced and bit her, sealing her fate. “The nuns killed most before they could add another victim to their ranks, but they couldn’t kill them all in time.”

Nathan nodded. “So you took your sister and ran?” he said. “The townspeople had figured it out by then?”

Josiah did stand, finally, hobbling weakly toward the table and collapsing into the other chair. He leaned down to his saddlebag where it sat under the table and began rummaging around. “One of the demons got out. They tried to stop it, but it had already done the damage.”

“Seen it spread like wildfire,” Nathan affirmed, fingering his journal in sad contemplation. “Ain’t sure why some turn quick and some linger. Only answer most people see is to kill ‘em all and have done.”

Josiah felt a coldness spread through his fevered body, his hand tight around the object he’d sought. “And what answer do you see?” he asked, dreading the revelation. If there had been a way to cast out that demon before Hannah succumbed…

Nathan sighed hopelessly. “Ain’t sure I got one,” he admitted. “But there’s got to be something to be done about it. Some way to stop it taking someone once they’re bit or make sure they don’t get bit in the first place… Just don’t seem like God meant for us all to end up like that, you know?”

“No, I don’t,” Josiah replied dully. He brought his hand up, placing the inkwell carefully on the table and seeing Nathan’s eyes light up. Boy probably didn’t have two pennies to his name. Seemed always to be the way with the rich in spirit, for some reason.

“Whatever you’re writing,” he said, sliding the ink toward him, “I figure you’d do better with something fresh.”

“Just notes,” Nathan said quietly, reaching for the inkwell and popping the cork on it, grinning like a child when his first word came out of the pen black and clear. “Doc Kimble taught me that mysteries were only ever solved by knowing as much as you can about the problem.”

Josiah snorted at that. Dr. Kimble was clearly a dreamer and probably hadn’t survived the demons from the sound of it. He contemplated the empty cup before him as Nathan wrote in a neat, small hand. “You have anything more potent to put in this cup?”

Nathan’s long measured look shamed him. A little. “Drink ain’t gonna help you, Josiah,” he said quietly.

“Nothing will help me, my friend.” Nothing but death, and that, he was far too cowardly to court.

“I can make my way south without you, then,” Nathan grated angrily, putting his pen down for the moment. “Figure if you stay here long enough, the zombies’ll finish you off, just like you like.”

The silence was oppressive and Josiah’s conscience worked on him, worried at him, made him wonder exactly what Hannah would have wanted for him… “All she ever wanted for me was my freedom,” he murmured finally, gaze falling on his sister’s shroud. “I left my father’s home with her blessing.”

Nathan didn’t ask him anything further, and Josiah didn’t offer, but the silence lightened. Josiah watched the younger man read through his writing, his head nodding more and more.

“You need to sleep, Nathan,” Josiah said finally.

The young man eyed him skeptically. “You ain’t gonna do nothing stupid if I do, are you?” he asked. “I didn’t put all that work into patching you up so you could walk out into the night and disappear on me.” The words were heartening, but the poor man was dead on his feet.

“Sun-up is soon enough,” Josiah assured him. “Assuming the demons don’t come calling first.”

Nathan blotted his journal, leaving the paper between the pages as he moved toward the bedroll he’d set out beside the cot where Josiah had woken. “Don’t seem like they can figure something as complicated as a locked door,” Nathan told him, curling himself onto the surface, his eyes already closed. “Long as you don’t go looking for ‘em…”

Josiah watched the young man drift immediately to sleep, then walked stiffly to the cot and took the blanket from it, draping it over Nathan’s slumbering form.

“Ain’t looking for anything,” Josiah whispered. “Not anymore.”

*******

Nathan woke around late morning, to the smell of something cooking. He stretched hard, feeling joints pop and tendons creak. He was used to sleeping wherever he could find a safe place, but it didn’t make it any easier on his body.

He sat up, looking around the little hovel. It was empty, and Hannah’s body was missing from its spot by the door. But Josiah’s saddlebags were still there, tucked under the table, so Nathan hauled himself to his feet and headed out the back, toward the grave he’d finished digging the day before.

Josiah had filled it in, the sling Nathan had put on his injured arm rolled neat and abandoned off to the side. He sat beside the mound of turned earth, working a piece of wood that was clearly the cross piece for a gravemarker. _Hannah G. Sanchez,_ the top read. The old man was finishing the rest.

“Thought you might sleep on through to night time,” Josiah said quietly, not looking up. “Soup’s in the pot—such as it is.”

“The soup, or the pot?” Nathan asked wryly. He was glad to see Josiah look up at him with a grateful smile.

“Both, I’m afraid.” He bent to his work again. “Been giving your horse a bit of time in the fresh air while I hunted up lunch. He’s tethered in the clover patch there.”

Nathan followed the direction of Josiah’s head nod and saw Washington munching away contentedly. Poor horse. That was the first good meal he’d had in a long time. A diet of just hay could weigh on a horse, Nathan reckoned. But he didn’t have money for fine oats and alfalfa when he went from town to town, and letting Washington have his freedom out in the open wasn’t something he normally gave himself time to do. Like sleeping so deep—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through anything….

This cabin was like a cool breath in his driven life, and it felt good. Josiah no longer looked dangerous or crazy to him. He seemed like someone he could trust. Maybe. Wouldn’t be bad to travel with him for a while. He glanced down after a time, as Josiah gave a sharp blow of air to sweep away the shavings.

_Hannah G. Sanchez_   
_aged 46_   
_Let light perpetual shine upon her_

Josiah struggled to his feet and Nathan reached out a hand to help him, picking the cross up off the dust, letting Josiah take it back from him and drive it into the ground. His shoulder was bleeding again, but Nathan didn’t have it in him right now to take him to task.

“Acknowledge sweet Hannah, Lord,” Josiah mumbled softly. “Sullied and sinning, she was still ever a sheep of your own flock, a child of your own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.”

“Amen,” Nathan helped him finish. He felt his cheeks heat in embarrassment as Josiah gave him a long, considering look. “Sorry for your loss,” he whispered.

Josiah sighed weakly. “Hannah was lost long ago, my friend,” he told him. “She’s finally where she belongs.” He clasped Nathan’s shoulder. “And where do you belong, Nathan? I can’t thank you enough, but I expect you should be getting home, yes?”

Nathan grinned a grin that was probably as wobegone as Josiah’s. “Ain’t rightly got one.” He looked down at Hannah’s grave marker. “Was heading east to Eagle’s Bend. Want to see how far this goes.”

“Not sure Eagle Bend is the place for a man of your convictions, Nathan,” Josiah offered. “Or your complexion, come to think of it.” He patted the shoulder he’d been holding onto as Nathan sighed. “The two things that survive all adversity, my friend: hatred and fear.”

“Suppose so,” Nathan agreed. It wouldn’t be the first place to deny him entry just for being a black man, but it was the only place within a day’s ride—a lot less from here, in fact. He’d’ve been there by noontime if he left at dawn.... He tried to remember the maps he’d memorized, figuring a place he could get to in a day. “Lord, I got no reason to go back west,” he said quietly, coming up blank. “Ain’t no answers to be found there.”

“I know a place,” Josiah said, turning from his sister’s grave and heading back to the cabin. “There’s a town beyond Eagle Bend. Little place, bad reputation. Four Corners, it’s called.” He shrugged. “There’s a reporter there named Steven Travis who might be able to help you out.”

“If the place is still standing,” Nathan said fatalistically.

“Well,” Josiah agreed amiably. “There is that.”

******

“Little place, huh?” Nathan asked, looking at the few dozen buildings at the bottom of the valley, burning with invitation in the growing sunset. “Ain’t that little.”

Josiah shook his head, obviously tired from his turn walking next to Washington. The stallion was powerful, but Nathan couldn’t risk him carrying two big men like themselves. The day had been very, very long as they traded turns walking alongside.

“Ain’t that protected, either,” the old man said critically. “Might be we find nothing but dust.”

As they approached, Nathan could see Josiah wasn’t _all_ right. The buildings were completely open to attack, yes, but there was a well-protected paddock outside what looked to be a livery. More than a dozen horses milled around behind solid-plank fencing, made strong to keep out the zombies. He had to wonder why they hadn’t fenced the whole town in.

People milled around the streets, he could see once they’d gotten up close. A few looked up warily, but most just went about their business as Josiah led the way to the newspaper office.

“The Clarion,” Nathan read, impressed. The building had had hurricane shutters added at some point, and there was a heavy outer door that could be closed against attack. So maybe they weren’t completely unprotected. He dismounted and petted Washington’s head, leading him toward the mostly-full trough outside.

“STOP!” A large man, Swedish by the sound and the look of him, came running up to them, grabbing for Washington’s reins before the horse could get his muzzle in the trough. Nathan had his hand on the butt of his gun in an instant, but Josiah was the one who actually drew down on the intruder. The man put up his hands immediately, but stared at them beseechingly. “Please not to let the horse drink.”

It took a moment to get what he meant, but Nathan gestured to Josiah to holster his weapon. “They came here, didn’t they?” he asked the man gently. When he nodded, Nathan pulled Washington away from the warm water. “Name’s Nathan Jackson,” he said. “I expect you’re the one who built the fence?”

The man nodded again. “I’m Jurgen Tjäder,” he said. “People here call me Tiny.” He chuckled as they both blinked at the nickname. “They think I am touched in the head. ‘A big fence is useless!’ ‘Sharing water with the draugr will not harm you’…” He glared at a man walking by, a white man with an officious air, a little older than Josiah, who looked at the three of them with both suspicion and disdain. “They are fools. I and my horses will likely outlive them.”

“We’re not all fools, Tiny,” a woman declared from behind them. “And I, for one, expect to outlive all of you.”

Jurgen smiled and Josiah and Nathan turned to the Clarion’s doorway to see a beautiful white woman in an ink-stained pale green dress that matched her startling eyes. She had white-blonde hair that was escaping its bonds to curl around her smudged and sweating face.

“You are an exception of course, Mrs. Travis,” Jurgen said in greeting. He patted Washington’s nose with instant familiarity. “I can take your horse, if you like?” he offered Nathan. He obviously couldn’t care less about Nathan being black, and that gave the place a good feeling.

Nathan grabbed his saddlebags, dug out some of his precious coins, and handed them and Washington over. “Ain’t sure how long we’ll be here.”

“I keep him safe,” Jurgen promised, leading the stallion away.

“Can I help you, gentlemen?” Mrs. Travis asked. Her bright eyes sharpened as she took in the town’s new visitors. “Do I know you?” she asked Josiah pointedly.

“Josiah Sanchez,” Josiah introduced himself, impressed by her memory. “I met you and your husband a couple of years ago. In search of a young woman?”

Mrs. Travis’s face tightened up and Nathan hoped that didn’t bode badly. “Yes, I remember now.” She shook herself. “What brings you back to Four Corners?”

Josiah had obviously caught on to her discomfort. “The, uh… The winds, mostly,” he offered finally. He gestured to Nathan. “And my friend here. Nathan has been researching the…” Josiah obviously wasn’t sure what to call it, now he was sober. Somehow Mrs. Travis didn’t seem like the type to accept that the disease was divine retribution.

“Nathan Jackson, ma’am,” he introduced himself. “Worked for a doctor on the Arizona border until he died. He thought there was something could be done about the epidemic.” He shrugged. “I been gathering information as I go.”

“And I seem to remember that you and your husband have a penchant for information gathering,” Josiah added, recovering himself. “We were hoping he had come across something that could help.”

Mrs. Travis sighed and gestured for the two of them to enter the newspaper office. The front of the room was dominated by a huge typesetting table, the back by a massive printing press.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to speak to my husband, Mr. Sanchez,” she said quietly. “He was murdered. Last year.”

Josiah sighed, his own loss too recent, Nathan knew. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured.

Mrs. Travis closed her eyes a moment. “Thank you.” And suddenly, it was like a coin had turned and she was all business. “I’ve been amassing what I could on the epidemic, as you call it, Mr. Jackson.” She shuddered. “Until recently, we’ve been saved from it here. I don’t know why—”

“Until recently?” Josiah cut in, though their introduction to Tjäder had alerted them already.

She nodded nervously. “Three nights ago.” Her hand shook a little as she gestured out the door. “A small group of four of… them.”

“Did many here in town get bit?” Nathan asked, his heart heavy for these people. Not that he hadn’t been through this with a hundred other towns since it all started.

“Attacked, you mean? Just Brian Taylor and his daughter,” she said. “Poor Sarah died almost instantly. Brian just passed this morning. We’ve got—”

“This morning?” Nathan asked, his throat closing up on him. “Where’s his body?”

“At the undertaker’s, of course,” Mrs. Travis said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

“Damn it,” Josiah growled, drawing his gun. “Where?” he barked.

“Right across the street,” she replied, frightened by his fierceness and irritated, too. “I know those superstitions about the bodies but—”

Nathan gripped his own gun tight and watched Josiah run for the building across the way. “They ain’t superstitions, Mz. Travis,” he grated, heading out himself. Three sharp gunshots sounded and he broke into a gallop. “JOSIAH!” he called.

He fetched up in the doorway, feeling Mrs. Travis pushing in behind him, and reached out a hand to hold her back. A body lay motionless at Josiah’s feet, and in the corner cowered a young, plump man in an undertaker’s smock.

“It came…” The undertaker tried to breathe, eyes huge as they latched onto Mrs. Travis’s shocked face. His heavy Irish brogue made understanding him difficult. “It… Mary, I swear, the body came right off the table—like a monster.”

“A demon,” Josiah murmured coldly.

“You bit?” Nathan asked the man. He looked at Nathan like he was insane. “Are you bit?” Nathan repeated sharply.

The young man ran a nervous hand over his smock. “Bitten? By _him_? I… I—” He lifted up the sleeve of his shirt to show a livid mark on his forearm, bleeding and torn. “Is…” He tried to swallow and made a choking sound instead as he looked at the twice-dead corpse. “Is that going to happen to me?”

Nathan cursed.

*******

“You’re insane, Nathan,” Josiah growled, looking on in disgust as Nathan made the undertaker, Martin Kirby, drink a foul-smelling concoction. “You know what needs to be done.”

Kirby looked up at him in terror, but the sickness was already taking him and he couldn’t hold back the wracking coughs that shook him. He’d be dead and given over to the demons by nightfall, likely. Seemed the young ones turned so quickly. Sarah Taylor had been lucky to simply die from the shock of it. Or maybe she was too pure for the demons...

“You can’t just kill someone in cold blood, Mr. Sanchez,” Mary Travis told him, the righteous indignation of ignorance suffusing her words. “Surely there’s something—”

“Know a doctor in California,” Nathan said, his hands steady and sure, his eyes on his patient. “Said he got one man through the sickness, once. Back to normal, almost.”

“Almost,” Josiah repeated. “And then what happened?”

Nathan looked up at him and Josiah could see the young man’s anguish. “He was dragged out of the clinic and shot dead.”

“Saved,” Josiah corrected. He looked down at Kirby, who was drifting now, as whatever Nathan had given him soothed the cough and rolled him under into sleep. “Would you risk the lives of this whole town in the hopes that one man can be saved?”

Nathan sat heavily on the stool he’d pulled up beside the table where Brian Taylor had come back from the dead just hours ago. Kirby twitched in his sleep on that same surface, and Nathan put a hand on his shoulder. “If it comes to that—”

“It’ll come to that, Nathan,” Josiah told him. “You know it will.”

Nathan shot to his feet. “No, Josiah, I don’t know!” He turned toward the window and Josiah wondered if the young man even noticed that Mary Travis was still there in the doorway, listening, absorbing it all. “I don’t know a damn thing, and neither do you!” He snorted. “It ain’t demons, Josiah. It’s something else. Something to do with the biology—what the hell would demons want with horses, anyway?” He ran a hand over his scalp. “There’s got to be a way to stop it. And we’re only going to find that way if we _try_.”

“You said there was a doctor in California that you’d been conversing with?” Mrs. Travis put in, cutting across the thickened silence. “Maybe he has some idea…”

“Cossican,” Nathan said. “In San Francisco.” He looked at the doomed man on the table and Josiah saw a resolve in his eyes and cursed it. Nathan was a soul desperate to do good, and that desperation would get him killed. “If I write out a message, could you have your telegraph man send something off? I don’t want to start a panic, but this is the first time I’ve been where I can care for someone right when they been bit.”

Mrs. Travis nodded, seeming glad to have something to do. “I’ll talk to him, Dr. Jackson—”

“I’m no doctor,” Nathan said, dropping back onto the stool as she nodded and left. He tilted his head up and caught Josiah’s eye. “Reckon you should go ahead and get yourself a room,” he said, returning his thoughts and gaze to the undertaker. “Ain’t sure how long this is gonna take.”

Josiah bent to toss Brian Taylor’s body over his good shoulder, grabbing the undertaker’s shovel as he went. Kirby wouldn’t be needed it again, no matter what grand hope the black man in front of him might be harboring. “I’d best get this taken care before nightfall,” he said, smiling sadly at his new friend. There was a connection here that he didn’t entirely understand, but he trusted Nathan Jackson. And he would keep him safe—even from himself. “I’ll be back with something to eat when I’m done.”

He almost laughed at the empty streets when he exited the building, remembering how forcefully innocent Four Corners had kept itself the last time he came through. Ostriches all, with their heads in the sand. There was going to come a day, soon enough, when these people would have to make a choice: to stand against the demons or fall to them. But choice required courage, and Josiah feared they’d find little of that here.

“Excuse me…”

The mouse of a voice had him turning as he reached the edge of the graveyard visible at the south end of town. A tall, thin man about Hannah’s age stood there, hands wringing each other, though a brave light tried to shine out from his eyes.

“My name is Richard Potter. I… I run the general store here. I heard Mary Travis talking about what happened, and I have—had—family in Arizona, so I know this is… It’s only going to get worse.”

“Yes,” Josiah replied brutally, continuing his walk to the back of the boneyard to dig another grave. One had already been too many, but he knew it wouldn’t stop here. “If you have loved ones here in town, you might think about moving on,” he said, dropping Taylor gently to the ground and hefting the shovel, though his injured arm protested. “I hear New York’s nice.”

“There was a reason I came west, sir, and I aim to stay,” Potter said, something angry in the tone. Anger required effort, and Josiah was a mite surprised to hear it. “So, I was wondering…” The shopkeeper sighed not-quite hopelessly. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

Josiah smiled, knowing it probably looked a little cold but certainly fit the moment. “Pray,” he said, watching Potter’s face fall. “And prepare,” he added. Potter’s eyes tracked back up to him, and the resolve there started building. _Perhaps there are a few eagles in this town after all,_ Josiah thought.

“I can do that,” Potter vowed. He looked at Brian Taylor and steel came into his eyes. “I’ll get my shovel.”

He walked off, head held higher than before, and Josiah sent a prayer of his own to Heaven. To Hannah, if she’d listen. _Let us save some,_ he prayed. _Just some._ He laughed at himself. Kin to St. Jude, indeed. Must mean he and Nathan were brothers.

Potter returned quickly, trailed by a handful of townspeople—brave enough to follow him to the gates of the graveyard, but no further. Still, as he and Potter started to dig, Josiah smiled.

They might not be a flight of eagles, but it was a start.

**********  
the end


End file.
